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Casablanca

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Plot Summary

The director of Casablanca, Michael Curtiz,
was born in Budapest, Hungary, in the late 1800s.
He began making films there in 1912, but
left Hungary in 1919 because of political
unrest. After leaving Hungary, he became a prolific filmmaker in
Europe, primarily in Austria, and in 1926 the
head of Warner Brothers’ Burbank, California studio, Jack Warner,
asked him to come to Hollywood. Over the course of his career, Curtiz
made almost one hundred films for Warner Brothers, including musicals,
detective stories, and horror films. Curtiz never mastered the English
language, though, and his cast and crew, disgruntled by Curtiz's
stubbornness and mean streak, often made fun of his linguistic mistakes,
calling them "Curtizisms."

Casablanca was released in 1942,
and it was an immediate success, despite Warner Brothers' fears
that it would fail. The film was nominated for eight Oscars and
won three, including Best Director for Curtiz. Despite the award,
Curtiz never really received credit for the film's remarkable achievements.
Critics viewed Curtiz as a skilled technician, but they had little
praise for his artistic sensibilities. Curtiz's other films never
garnered much recognition, and even the success of Casablanca was
not enough to elevate his reputation. Most of Casablanca's
numerous fans wouldn't be able to identify its director by name.

Casablanca has become a legend in large
part because of its two leading actors, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid
Bergman, who play Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, respectively. Bogart's
and Bergman's portrayals of Rick and Ilsa's tortured reunion and
separations are as stunning now as they were in 1942.
Yet both Bogart and Bergman proved to be difficult participants
in Casablanca. Bogart acted in four other movies
in 1942, and Casablanca was
far from his favorite. Bergman took the part of Ilsa only because
she was initially denied a role she really wanted, the female lead
in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. When she
was eventually chosen for that film, she stopped thinking about Casablanca,
prompting the envious Paul Heinreid, who plays Victor Laszlo, to
denigrate her as a careerist "tiger."

Other parts of the making of Casablanca are
also sobering and pedestrian. The movie was filmed in a period of
less than three rushed months, the actors didn't like each other
or the director, and the screenwriters reworked the script on the
fly. The film was one of many that Warner Brothers made during the
summer of 1942, and it was hardly the most
expensive or the one they anticipated to become a major hit. In
short, the film was just another Hollywood studio production, a
chaotic collaboration whose various parts might or might not come
together successfully.

Of course, its parts did come together successfully—magnificently—but
a few happy accidents are also responsible for the film's tremendous
popularity and classic status. For example, composer Max Steiner
created an original song to replace "As Time Goes By," a song he
hated, but the scenes were not re-filmed because Bergman had already
had her hair cut for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Likewise,
the screenplay for Casablanca evolved out of a
play entitled Everybody Comes to Rick's, which
was written in 1941, before the United States
entered World War II. The play has a clear anti-Nazi slant, just
as Casablanca does, but prior to Pearl Harbor,
a movie studio in the neutral United States would probably not have made
such a political movie. In this respect, the timing was perfect. Casablanca is
an unusual World War II movie in that it isn't overly propagandistic—in
other words, it doesn't go overboard in preaching about the justness
of the cause and the certainty of victory. In 1942,
the U.S. was suffering in the Pacific, and Allied victory seemed
far from certain. Casablanca captures this unique
moment in America's part in the conflict, when the nation was fully
at war but not yet fully indoctrinated in a war ideology. Throughout
the film, the war's outcome is uncertain, and Casablanca is a place
of anxiety and uncertainty. This uncertainty lends the movie a genuine tension
and renders the political activities of Laszlo and Rick all the more
heroic.

Just the title of the film is enough to conjure up visions
of a distant, longed-for past. Though perhaps not the greatest of
the old Hollywood black-and-white films—that honor would probably
fall to Citizen Kane-—Casablanca may
be the most loved. When someone says, "They don't make movies like
they used to," it is a good bet that Casablanca is
the film they're measuring against the disappointing present. Unlike
many other great successes, Casablanca's popularity
is well deserved. The film is deeply intelligent and functions both
as a political allegory about World War II and a timeless romance.
While many critics respect the film for the former achievement,
the film's overwhelming popularity rests squarely on the latter,
and Casablanca remains one of the greatest love
stories in movie history.

Recently I learned there are three verses to "As Time Goes By," omitted from the film music to Casablanca, sung by Dooley Wilson, and now accepted as standard. Rather than retype them here, readers can go to Wikipedia articles, (i) "As Time Goes By" and (ii) read also about the composer, Herman Hupfeld, NOT Max Steiner, who, purportedly did not like the song/verses in the first place. The complete lyrics make more sense for me now than previously, as lovely as they were/now are.